Why the hand wringing? If anything, from the way Unknown Worlds tells it, they just needed to secure some investment that didn't demand handing over their soul as part of the deal.

And if there is anything I take from Charlie's "concept" talk, its that he loves games in general, so he likes to wax philosophical about concepts, not that he is re-tweaking NS2 every other day to please fickle forum fans tastes. Core concepts still remain the same: http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/about/

Since they are new independent start up, they have been laying the foundation for things to come, I think you'll be surprised when they blast through production on this because they took the time to set a solid development framework - because doing it any other way would tax heavily on their limited resources. Its all about the hiccups of going from spare time, remote mod team to full time, face to face hard currency team.

So much half glass empty. If Unknown World's thought like that, they wouldn't have even made it this far.

If I can speak really briefly on the 'core audience' of NS. Really great team games, are, by nature, going to utterly SUCK on anonymous sorta servers, where communication is none-existent and no one cares about objectives. The sort of people who really 'get' NS are either :

1) hardcore gamers.2) hardcore gamers.

Yeah, that's right, all of you are hardcore gamers. This is talking about all gamers on average. The average gamer is not really well versed in the land of 'mods' and 'plugins' and probably abhors joining a server forum. The average gamer wants Halo or CS. Shoot-em up, get out.

It's a mistake, IMHO, to try and target a deep and strategic game at the average gamer. You cannot dumb it down enough. The average gamer doesn't care enough about 'core game mechanics' to learn them or invest the time to communicate with teammates.

The target demographic, the ideal, IMHO, are all those folks who bought Sins of the Solar Empire. IT's small, but big enough. Something like NS is never going to have the accessibility of CS or DoD or Halo. They need to give up on that dream.

God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of his own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players, to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time. Terry Pratchett

I don't doubt that NS2 will be out *someday*, but I don't want it to turn into a Duke Nukem Forever. NS was one of my first and strongest loves in the FPS genre. It was such a good concept that could've been put on a better development time table.

Sure, you can't sell your soul out of the IC groups, but you've got to make concessions when you need money. One of the things that bothers me time and time again is that until Sudoku came out, UWE didn't really seem to care much about money. If they did care they would've gotten their act together, or at least leveraged the awesome community they *had.* They had to make some trade-offs somewhere, and I'm glad they finally did. If anything the IC group will give them the necessary pressure to produce the game ASAP. Old men with money don't like it when you waste their dough

My point though really, is that NS has been out since Oct 31, 2002. 2 years in gaming time is like eternity. When NS came out, HL1 was already 5 years old, and that GoldSrc engine was based on 2 even older engines that stretched back nearly half a decade. UWE did wonders with the GoldSrc engine, pushed it to the max even. They made one of the most acclaimed mods of all time. Then they decided to be arrogant and sit on their laurels and do nothing with it. Talk of NS2 began years ago, almost nearly since NS was released, actually. They were supposed to develop and release it by the time HL2 was out. HL2 was delayed a year because of hacked codebase (lol, I never believed that excuse). The SDKs were available. NS2 still didn't appear. That was when NS2 was supposed to just be a mod anyway. And now, the Source engine is showing its age compared to newer alternatives.

During this time, they didn't release anything except for old NS screenshots and lip service. They didn't get far because they were lazy and thought so highly of themselves that they expected people to give them free money. Remember the fiasco with Charlie asking people for donations? OK, so I'm already a Constellation member, but there's no hell you're gonna pry money from my dirty paws and tell me "Well, if we end up making NS2 then this money is a down payment for your game, but if we don't then oh well!" He specifically said that he wouldn't guarantee that NS2 would come out, though he still asked for the money. You don't get very far in persuading people to give you money if you show them outdated screens and words on some blog. Finally, they started working and released some interesting concepts like the dynamic infestation and the torrent of concept art. *That* shows that you're working. And with that work, and the more regular updates through the blog to the community and potential investors, it was much easier to get money. IC types have a lot of money to throw around, but like any smart gambler they want to know they have a good chance of winning before they throw in their bets.

Well ok. I think I've made my point about how much time they wasted. I don't claim to be a mod or programming guru, but as a loyal and reasonable fan, I expected at least progress reports. They pretty much slighted the community by not having a functional website, not really caring about how we as a whole felt. After a while, fanaticism dies down if the messiah isn't coming up with a new bag of magic tricks. The community left for GW, WoW, CS:S, DoD:S, TF2, what have you.

UWE needs people like you CW. You're still optimistic about things. Things are looking better now, I suppose. They finally have to grow up and become professionals instead of amateurs, since they undoubtedly have contracts with the IC people. No money comes for free. I'm looking forward for very good news from them in the near future. Hopefully I can again be as optimistic as you are. Make no mistake, I love NS. I really do.

Ahh, I totally see where you are coming from, no argument here on that NS1 is dead - it was a dated mod, on a dated game, that limited its potential by their own admission when they were asked to add this or that idea. I can also see where the donations stuff became a bad investment of one's earnings - which I actually brought up only to them when I said I wanted to make a small investment on the forums of say $20 like a pre-purchase, they said no thanks, too much hassle; I guess the events you mentioned was the reason I received that answer, at least they learned from that mistake.

Though, I do disagree that Source is dated. From time to time I play HL2 and its add on episodes, and, well, maybe this is just the experiences of a gamer from the NES 8-bit days or text adventures talking, but the graphical eye candy still blows me away. Perhaps its just my age (27!?) showing, I'm getting long in the tooth for games, graphical eye candy hasn't really affected my purchase of a game in years, if it ever did.

I guess you could see my view as optimism, I see it more just like pragmatic view where they either get it done or have it go on their reputations in the game development community, effectively deep sixing any notion they might have at career in the industry to an extent. The risks are huge, the rewards only slight - unless they somehow get lucky and go to work for Valve or something, similar to what have happened for other spare time mod ventures that tried to cross over from free to for profit development. Its do or die time - it probably is optimistic to hope they won't die

What the hell happened to moderators like Monsi and co. who banned people for starting flamewars and generally took care of that kind of crap? It's like they let the 13 year olds take over or something. Such a shame.

What the hell happened to moderators like Monsi and co. who banned people for starting flamewars and generally took care of that kind of crap? It's like they let the 13 year olds take over or something. Such a shame.

Agreed. That's why I make good use of the ignore posts thing over there, once a particular poster seems to show a pattern of flame throwing and other thread pyro tendencies I pretty much write them off as having anything useful to contribute.